The Art of Relationship: The Morality of Love Versus Control

Powered by RedCircle

Near the end of Charles Dickens’ tale, “A Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge, standing before the visage of his own grave, searching for redemption after a long night’s journey into the darkness of his own soul, cries out:

Spirit! …hear me! I am not the man I was.… Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

Over the course of Scrooge’s Dark Night of the Soul, the Three Spirits confront his lifetime spent in pursuit of social prominence and ravenous profiteering. His selfishness and greed have left him bereft of family or friendships—destined to die alone, forsaken, and unnoticed. In the morning, as the Dark Night passes away, Scrooge awakens to an undeveloped potential buried deep within his soul for compassion and generosity towards his fellow man. He makes a transformational choice to let go of his prior ways, to embrace a future life of charity, and to repair his broken relationships in the present.

Our own life story begins in the past, a consequence of countless, thoughts, actions, and decisions made by others and ourselves in a bygone time and place, which then forges our potential and subsequent experiences in the present moment and builds a framework of future possibilities. However, when this life story is founded in fear and scarcity, it leads to an obsession with ordering one’s relationships and circumstances according to a moral framework of control, motivated by selfishness and greed.

On the other hand, a life story founded on a belief and experience of safety and sufficiency can lead to a spirit of openness to community and sharing with others according to a moral framework of love, motivated by compassion and generosity. To understand our present foundation and capacity for relationship, we must go back and examine this underlying archetypal dynamic of love versus control as a framework for our life’s journey.

At the heart of the human condition is the recognition that we are impotent in the face of the inevitable course of time and the forces of nature. Thus, humans have attempted to reconcile themselves to the capricious whims of these often devasting powers by devising elaborate rituals to control them.

Conceptually, the word religion is fundamentally defined as a ritual action to control one’s circumstances or fate. The etymology of the word religion evolves out of an underlying Latin word meaning “to bind”, variously used to describe fear, obligation, or conformity. This may describe our personal orientation to some overwhelming circumstance or uncertainty such as a favorable fall harvest, a relationship status, an unusual skin rash, or the outcome of this weekend’s baseball championship. And then, on a societal level, it may inspire the establishment of hierarchical institutions that embody the need for social control, delegating preeminent authority to a privileged-few priests or rulers, who mediate the power of the gods.

The associated religious mythologies are fundamentally moralistic narratives that define human frailty in the face of the powers of nature and the gods. Many of these myths in turn inspire religious rituals that compensate for the desires and appetites of a particular god. On one hand, the impulse underlying these rituals may be to control chaotic human behavior that angers the god, threatening punishment upon the sinner and possibly bringing great catastrophe on the entire community. On the other hand, these religious rituals may describe a way to influence or control the gods by giving to them what they desire, transacting a reward or benefit from them.

In ancient Greek cosmology, one’s Fate was threaded by the weavers of destiny according to the god’s grand cosmic scheme, the sublime natural order. Greeks, like many other cultures, viewed humans as victims of fate, suffering from the moral consequences of their own hubris, as well as the fitful discord and petulant impulsivity of the gods. In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, Odysseus is at odds with Poseidon, the god of the ocean. As a result, he wanders for a decade upon the seas, futilely attempting to sail home after the Trojan War, thwarted by the god at every turn. In the myth of the trials of Hercules, he is a son of Zeus and a mortal woman that Zeus rapes. Hera, the goddess of marriage and the scorned wife of Zeus, jealously responds to Zeus’ infidelity by continually causing trouble for his offspring. Throughout Greek mythology, humans must struggle to pacify the powers above and below in order to survive in an often-dangerous world.

The ancient Greeks devised one of the most elaborate systems of ritual service to the gods, building grand monuments and temples to each Olympic god who represented a force of nature or a principle of human behavior. According to Plato, the Greek word for these overseers on Mount Olympus was derived from the Greek word for a runner, which he states embodies the early Greeks’ belief that these powers moved or ran across the heavens, influencing our lives on a grand scale. This then developed into a system of ritual behavior to influence the gods through festivals and offerings.

Similarly, the English word “god” comes from an old German word indicating, “One to whom one pours out a libation,” inferring the invocation of a transactional benefit. It is this archetypal sense of contracting with a god by offering materials or services that defines this universal human response to our fear of helplessness and vulnerability within the capricious world of gods and nature.

The archetypal dynamic of religious control is fundamentally transactional. It requires sacrifice to the powers that control one’s fate. One must feed the gods to gain their favor or to remove some curse. In Greek society, just as in many other pre-modern societies, this was done directly by ritually constructing images of wood or stone to represent the power of the gods, providing a tangible focus when offering an obligatory sacrifice.

Whether one calls it fate, destiny, luck, or the hand of god, our magical proclivity to create a supernatural alliance is more than just some primitive impulse confined to superstitious pre-modern societies. Rather, it is the product of a universal narrative that is perpetually experienced as an archetypal dimension of human nature, whether or not one is openly theistic.  Our deep-felt sense of fear and isolation are powerful drivers that draw us into the narrative of our separateness and the necessity to seek control. As such, in modern times, humans sacrifice time and money to gain the power of what they fear is lacking in their lives. They seek out celebrities, sport teams, and cultural authorities to follow in order to give them a sense of purpose, identity, or worth. They pursue wealth and power to control their unease and sense of vulnerability, sacrificing both personal relationships and community for an individualistic notion that possessions and authority make their lives valuable.

At a societal level, fear and isolation becomes the foundation for building the political and religious institutions that circumscribe our personal idolatry—a shared longing to pacify the gods or forces that represent our vulnerability. This political narrative of control often becomes a recursive story within a story as the foundation for racism, exploitation, and hierarchical rule. Firstly, it begins in the authoritarian narrative of the right of one heroic individual to rule over a tribal association to bring purpose, identity, and safety against the perceived dangers outside the group. And then, secondly, within this paternal narrative, it inevitably invokes the right of one tribal group to subjugate some inferior enemy caste, often identified as the valueless monster that must be dominated or destroyed to protect the wellbeing of the tribe. This, subsequently, justifies giving up even more power to the ruling elite.

Under this dysfunctional political hierarchy, humans are merely victims of a larger conflict, searching for a hero to save them from the insatiable appetite of an overpowering monster. Some individuals respond by identifying with the monster who, then, exploit others in either support or violation of a divine moral code. Still others become enrolled as societal heroes who fight the monster to restore cosmic order according to the dictates of the cultural or religious narratives.

The counterpoint to this political narrative is the relational or familial perception of power—that is, the prosocial ideology of love and community as a universal experience in which humanity has an intrinsic value that is worth celebrating and protecting. While, on one hand, this can be argued as a product of maturity as one grows and develops in their understanding of the world. On the other hand, it essentially begins, of necessity, very primitively in the unbroken gaze of mother and child, as Lover and Beloved. Mature development is merely the understanding of the universality of the human family, the value and strength of community.

In popular culture, the British band, “The Beatles” famously sang “All you need is love,” reflecting the Hippie generation of the 60’s mantra of “Peace, Love, and Understanding.” In a 1967 interview, John Lennon, a member of the Beatles, said, "Love is the most important thing in the world. It’s more important than food, or money, or anything else. Love is what keeps us together." Shortly thereafter, the Beatles unceremoniously broke up amidst irreconcilable conflicts within and without the band. The Hippie Generation of the 60’s antithetically became the self-obsessed Me Generation of the early 80’s, then the Religious Right in the later part of the 20^th century, and subsequently, the Cultural Warriors of the early 21^st century, which is currently attempting to dismantle the fundamental woke imperative of “Peace, Love, and Understanding” many of them once espoused in the 60’s.

Love is paradoxically both mysterious and obvious. Within popular culture and mythology, Love is a presumptively vague platitude--as we search for love, find love, make love, send our love, while we decide whom or what deserves our love. We love our mother, ice cream, our favorite sports team, and our favorite song without pausing to consider what it actually means to love. And we would most certainly love to see our foes suffer a humiliating defeat or be destroyed all together. The word love becomes just a vague placeholder for something we desire without truly understanding our varied experience of it.

The ancient Greeks explained different conceptual actions and desires with separate words to alternately indicate erotic or attractive desire, friendship, familial devotion, as well as altruistic action in support of another. All these separate Greek concepts get swept together when translated into English by the ambiguous emotional platitude, “love.”

Thus, love generally indicates something we feel good about and, consequently, something that can be lost if circumstances are disadvantageous or disagreeable. As such, we fall out of love with our family, friends, lovers, sport teams, and menu selections. Yet, we still believe that somehow, love is all we need.

The art of relationship is paradoxically both enigmatic and familiar. As children, we learn a pattern of relationship within our families, regardless of how healthy or functional these relationships are in our developmental journey. The formative attachment between parent and child is founded on a normative intuition, an archetypal pattern, of the safety of home and family. We intuitively discern what it means to depend on others, beyond our capabilities to meet our own needs. And we find value in the possibility and opportunity of cooperation and shared family responsibility.

Subsequently, our emotional temperament arises out of an implicit differential between an archetypal ideal of family relationship against our actual experience of support and safety—a subjective evaluation of our unmet emotional and physical needs.

Regardless of our ability to articulate this ideal, or our awareness even of our unmet childhood needs, the developmental journey must necessarily be completed to become mature personalities, healthy mates, good parents, and beneficial members of society. What is lacking in the childhood family structure must eventually be developed over the subsequent course of our adult lives in order to nurture healthy relationships.

As we travel along our life’s journey, we internalize many different narratives, different stories, based on experiences both real and imagined. As the basis for learned behavior, these narratives become an operational palette underlying habitual responses to new experiences based on emotional triggers at the core of these narratives. These associative triggers bring an instinctual script from memory to be a retrospective context for what is happening in the moment, creating a predictable pattern to our presence in the world. In turn, these psychological tendencies define our personality. And as a whole, these inculcated narratives are our personal mythology—the collection of stories that formulate our identity.

Our formative family experiences create a subset of our personal mythology that becomes the basis for our adult relationships. When this repertoire is inadequate, we must amend them with corrective experiences. A key archetype in this repertoire is the cultivated Parent image based on our developmental encounters with responsible adults in childhood—whether they be our own parents, or others that provided a safe place for our development, such as teachers, mentors, or coaches. From this, we may begin to develop an archetypal relationship with the image of a Good Parent—one who protects and nurtures the vulnerable child within our narrative repertoire.

Without a good sense of this Responsible Adult in our personal mythology, it is not possible to become a responsible adult in our experiential day to day lives. We subsequently collapse into our existential vulnerability as perpetual victims in a dangerous world, operating defensively out of fear and inadequacy. Unfortunately, without corrective engagement, one may live their entire life reacting to a state of powerlessness and victimhood, perpetually engaged in the dysfunctional power struggle of the Victim, Monster, and Hero, which empirically, is quite common.

On the other hand, the archetypal relational pattern of functional empowerment develops in the form of the Lover-Beloved relationship. Mythologically, this is illustrated in the pre-religious interpretation of the Torah and Gospel stories. In the original mythology, the term “elohim” means “a very great power.”  As such, a family of powerful elohim is described in the narrative—Yahweh is the Parent Elohim and Adam is the first Child Elohim—setting the pattern for the Universal Family of Elohim that includes all of humanity. The myth unfolds as the Parent Elohim tries to raise up his children in his image as the Good Parent.

This archetypal image, or Imago, is described in a particular conversation with Moses, a foundational leader of the mythological tribe of Israel, in which Yahweh identifies himself as one “who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant with [kindness] and truth.”  This is then repeated multiple times throughout the writings of Jewish Histories and Prophets to describe the character of Yahweh as the Good Parent. In this familial context, it becomes a description of what it means to be a mature adult Elohim, the ultimate framework for human development. Later in the Gospel accounts, Rabbi Jeshua emphasizes this purpose, stating:

Yet I am saying to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who are persecuting you, so that you may become sons of your Father Who is in the heavens, for He causes His sun to rise on the [hurtful] and the good, and makes it rain on the just and the unjust... You, then, shall be [mature] as your heavenly Father is [mature].

Our primary identity as Child Elohim defines our inherent great powers. The archetype of the Lover-Beloved is founded on our capacity to use our great power relationally, to altruistically benefit others in mutual relationship. A moral choice is given to love and support each and every person within the universal family regardless of caste, custom, conduct, or creed.  On the other hand, we also may choose to use our powers politically, or selfishly, to benefit ourselves, separating ourselves by building walls to keep out our fears and vulnerabilities.

In the moralistic religion of Judaism, the relational framework of the universal family of Adam in the Torah mythology is replaced by a transactional covenant. Coming out of the Hasidic movement of the neo-Babylonian captivity in the 6^th century BCE, the captive Jewish people sought the blessings of a tribal god to restore their national identity. The parent Elohim, Yahweh, of the Torah is reimagined as the tribal god of the Israelite nation who values and blesses the Jewish people over all other tribes and nations based on their conformity to a moral code, known as the Mosaic Law. If the Jewish nation fulfills their end of a bargain, the exclusionary tribal god will restore the dominance of the mythic kingdom of David.

In the original pre-Christian Torah-Gospel mythology, there is a fundamental narrative of the battle between the religious and familial value systems. The four Gospel accounts of Rabbi Jeshua’s life and ministry are founded on the familial Torah tradition of the fatherhood of Yahweh and his anointed Son who comes to restore the intimacy and power of love within the universal family.

Initially, this is contrasted with the moralism of the Jewish religious elite. But then later, a competing moralistic gospel of sin and salvation is instituted in the prophetic epistles of the neo-apostle Paul. This new transactional gospel replaces the need for continual offerings to satisfy the hunger of the Christian god with one ultimate human sacrifice, which sort of satisfies the anger of this moralistic Christian god, and sort of removes the curse of sin, once additional criteria are met to avoid eternal damnation. Later, this becomes the foundation for all the various Christian religious traditions after it is made a primary tenet in the fourth century Nicene Creed which unified Christian doctrine under the decree of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

Many, if not most, religious mythologies begin by defining some broad relational foundation that is then developed into some divine moral code. However, there is an overwhelming tendency to move away from the relational to the institutional, from love to control, regardless of how central love or relationship is to the framework of the incipient mythology. The heart of the problem is that love and community are seen as a weakness within the political hierarchy. Relationships inevitability require one to make oneself vulnerable to another, to open up oneself to the reactions and motives of another. And this is seen as fundamentally dangerous, exposing one to potential harm by others who often may be seen as competitors and enemies. There is inherently a cost to form an open community. This has historically caused the idealism of the belief in a universal family to repeatedly fail, to be discarded for the safety of some authoritarian construct that controls our place in society at the cost of our personal relationships with one another. And of course, it is inherently advantageous for those at the top of the political hierarchy to promote and reinforce the claim that they are superior and should be given power and privileges to rule over the underclass according to the supposed will of god.

The moral foundation of human behavior, both individually and corporately, may thus be characterized by these two fundamentally opposed ways of being in the world. We either follow a path of mutual relational association motivated by love, or else, a path of hierarchical moralistic disassociation motivated by control.

As with the Dark Night of Ebenezer Scrooge, each Life is a story framed in the past, the present, and the future, written in indelible brush strokes on a living canvas that makes up who we are—our identity. Every breath we take is a note in a grand cosmic composition, born in solitude and joined to the universal chorus of humanity. While life inevitably happens moment by moment, moving us forward in time, we have an elemental choice to open up our emotive crayon box to respond to life in all the glorious colors of a shared odyssey, or to hold on to those one or two familiar crayons, representing some darker shade of fate, marked by a life of angst and dissipation, to repetitively work over the same existential spot, with the same monotonous strokes, until our crayons are worn thin in our darkest night.

The Art of life is the composite brush strokes that paint our personal mythology, framing our operative identity, what makes us who we are. Within this archetypal framework of Love versus Control, we choose the color palette from which to interpret or rationalize our experiences, privileging some stories while ignoring others, and then burying the incongruent narratives deep within our subconscious. If we choose the drab color palette of Control, we privilege the narrative of our repetitive victimization—stories of powerlessness, competition, and struggle within a dangerous world. We either rise to the top to subjugate others, or else sink to the bottom in perpetual servitude.

On the other hand, if we develop a broader, more complex palette of Love, we privilege the narrative of our vibrant empowered possibilities—turning stories of vulnerability and failure into the potential for cooperative relationship in community. We may then let our guard down in recognition of our mutual need for one another. As we reach out for help and support from others, we, in turn, make ourselves available to support those in need.

Love in community is an altruistic action operating as a product of the power narratives we develop and nurture. It begins with our lived experiences but grows as we develop a more mature understanding of these experiences and the possibilities they bring to relationship and our identity as lover and beloved.